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Group Dependabot updates more broadly - #2458

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What problem does this pull request solve?

Trello card:

Dependabot opens about 8 PRs a week on this repo, mostly for single dependencies. This groups minor and patch bumps so we get fewer PRs to review:

  • Gems: one group for development gems and one for production gems
  • npm: one group for dev dependencies
  • GitHub Actions: one group for all actions
  • Security updates: one group each for gems and npm

Majors, Rails minor upgrades and npm production packages such as govuk-frontend still get their own PRs. Schedules stay weekly.

Applying this to last year's bumps gives about 4 or 5 PRs a week instead of 8.

This makes the same change as govuk-forms/forms-admin#3263.

Things to consider when reviewing

  • sentry and vite_ruby now only group major bumps. Their minor and patch bumps go in the gem groups.
  • A broken bump holds up the rest of its group until we fix or ignore it.
  • The auto-approve workflow only merges PRs whose update-type is a patch. For a grouped PR, fetch-metadata reports the highest bump in the group, so a gem group will only auto-merge in weeks when every bump in it is a patch.

theseanything and others added 5 commits October 29, 2026 15:01
We get a steady stream of PRs to bump actions, most of them for
`ruby/setup-ruby`, which releases most weeks. Bumping our actions is
low risk, so we can review them together in one PR each week.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each week brings a few gem bumps, but they're spread across lots of
gems, so the groups for specific gems still leave us with mostly
single-gem PRs. Grouping minor and patch bumps by Gemfile group gives
us at most two PRs a week, and keeps test tooling bumps separate from
the gems we run in production.

The AWS SDK gems now fall into the production group. The Sentry and
Vite Ruby groups only need to handle major bumps, which the new groups
leave out, so those gems still get bumped together.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rails minor releases can change framework defaults and deprecate
behaviour, so we want to review them on their own rather than as part
of the production gems group. Rails patch releases are still grouped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Most of our npm PRs are for build and test tooling such as Vite, Vitest,
Sass and PostCSS, which release often. Our CI checks that a bump to these
still builds and passes tests, so they can share a weekly PR.

govuk-frontend and dfe-autocomplete change what users see, so they
still get their own PRs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Version update groups don't apply to Dependabot security updates, so
these still arrive one dependency at a time, mostly for packages we
don't depend on directly, such as undici, js-yaml, rack and nokogiri.
Grouping them per ecosystem means fewer PRs to review.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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🎉 A review copy of this PR has been deployed! It is made of up two components

  1. A review copy of forms-runner
  2. A production copy of forms-admin

It may take 5 minutes or so for the application to be fully deployed and working. If it still isn't ready
after 5 minutes, there may be something wrong with the ECS task. You will need to go to the integration AWS account
to debug, or otherwise ask an infrastructure person.

For the sign in details and more information, see the review apps wiki page.

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